The Movie Review: 'Red Eye' and 'Flightplan'

By Christopher Orr

You hear a lot of
complaining, and rightly so, about Hollywood's tendency to churn out
safe, unimaginative pabulum--the remakes, the sequels, the
blow-everything-up movies. Less remarked upon is the opposite problem:
The studios' inability (or unwillingness) to make B+ movies, competent,
mid-sized genre films that are formulaic in the good sense. There
was a time when Hollywood excelled at producing such solid but
unexceptional fare--Westerns are the classic example--but no longer.
These days, almost every movie needs to have a special hook, a tease,
something that will make it new and different and (in theory) better. No
one wants a base hit; it's all about swinging for the bleachers.

The reason is clear enough. Back in the late 1940s, when Randolph Scott was making three or four cowboy movies a year, two-thirds of Americans went to the movies during any given week. They didn't need a reason;
it was just part of the routine, and as long as the film was moderately
diverting they generally felt they got their money's worth. But TV
watching has been gradually replacing film attendance for decades, and
today, with our ever-expanding array of at-home alternatives (satellite,
DVD, pay-per-view, TiVo), just 10 percent of us go to the movies each
week. If we weren't actively lured with the promise of something fresh
and remarkable--a more radical twist (the lady detective is also the
serial killer!), wilder stunt (two helicopters collide in the Lincoln
Tunnel!), or bigger star (Russell Crowe as Stephen Hawking!)--we might
not go at all.

Which brings me to Red Eye and Flightplan, two
late-summer entertainments just released on video. On the surface they
could hardly be more alike: Both feature smart female protagonists who,
in the midst of innocent airline trips, find themselves enmeshed in
elaborate terrorist plots that threaten the lives of their family
members. The two even share Hitchcockian affectations: Red Eye could easily have been titled Strangers on a Plane, while Flightplan aspires to be The Little Lady Vanishes. But the similarities end there. Red Eye
is a great example of the vanishing breed of B+ genre movies: smart but
modest, an enjoyable way to pass a couple of hours if not a terribly
memorable one. Flightplan, by contrast, is an excellent reminder
of all the things that can go wrong with Hollywood's operating premise
that bigger will be better.

Red Eye is the increasingly rare studio release that was
written entirely by one screenwriter, TV veteran Carl Ellsworth, and it
shows. The plot is straightforward and all of a piece, with none of the
narrative discursions or tonal shifts or elaborate backstories that
often appear when one writer's work is "juiced up" by another. Lisa
Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is a twentysomething luxury-hotel manager
preparing to fly home to Miami after attending her grandmother's funeral
in Dallas. We get a glimpse of her poise and intelligence when, on her
way to the airport, her cell phone rings and she has to talk a panicked
subordinate through an encounter with difficult hotel guests. ("There
are no guests who are assholes," she explains, "only guests with special
needs.") Her flight is delayed, but in the ticket line she meets a
pleasant young man named Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy). The two cross
paths again at the airport bar, where they pass the time with
conversation and cocktails. They seem to hit it off: Is he interested in
her?

He is, though not in the way she supposes. When the plane finally
boards, lo and behold, they have cozily adjacent seats. In the air, they
chat some more. When she asks what he does for a living, he responds,
"government overthrows, flashy, high-profile assassinations, the usual."
It's not a joke. He proceeds to explain that the deputy secretary of
Homeland Security will shortly be arriving at her hotel. He would like
her to call and change the suite the secretary will be staying in to a
more vulnerable one. If she doesn't, he will phone an associate and give him the order to
kill her father (Brian Cox). As evidence that this can be done, he
displays her father's wallet, pilfered from his bureau earlier in the
day.

The plot unfolds organically from this simple cat-and-mouse premise,
with the two antagonists behaving with an intelligence and plausibility
all too rare in movies these days. Lisa tries to alert a fellow
passenger of the terrorist plot with a message scrawled in a borrowed
book; Rippner intercepts it. She writes a soapy warning on the lavatory
mirror; he--well, you get the idea. There are no out-of-left-field plot
twists. She's not secretly in on the conspiracy; he's not working on the
secretary's behalf to make him look heroic with a phony assassination
attempt. Everyone is exactly who he appears to be. Yes, amazingly, it's
really that easy to make a good movie. This is the kind of film that
Hollywood ought to (and once did) make a hundred of each year. Instead,
we're lucky if we get a dozen.

It helps that Red Eye is blessed with two gifted young
performers. Since her breakthrough performance as a delightfully haughty
high-school queen bee in Mean Girls,
Rachel McAdams has been fast establishing herself as one of the most
versatile young actresses in Hollywood. Her alert intelligence is a
pleasant tonic in an onscreen world full of bland beauties. Cillian
Murphy, too, is on the rise following his indelibly creepy performance
as Dr. Crane in Batman Begins. With his measured charm and blue
eyes as chilly as a slap of Aqua Velva, he's a villain Hitchcock would
have admired. The final crucial ingredient is director Wes Craven, who
demonstrates that that his B-movie chops are not limited to slasher
movies. His direction is brisk and unfussy; as a result, the film seems
to follow the motto by which Lisa says her grandmother lived: "Always
look forward."

Flightplan, too, opens with a death in the family, but rather
than look forward it is mired in the past. Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster), a
propulsion engineer living in Berlin, is mourning the death of her
husband, who fell off a roof. The maudlin, pretentious early scenes are
like a lecture in Death Imagery 101: black crows, departing subway cars,
an open window that lets in the winter chill. Kyle is just barely
keeping herself together. Sometimes she imagines that her husband is
still alive, walking with her through the Teutonic gloom. But there are
arrangements to be made: She and her six-year-old daughter, Julia, must
accompany the coffin back to the States on an airliner.

But not just any airliner. They're traveling on an enormous new
passenger jet for which Kyle helped design the engines. The film seems
absurdly delighted about this two-level aeronautical elephant, gliding
over its wide staircases and gleaming cocktail lounge. (Because what
airline wouldn't want its passengers to spend the flight out of their
seats getting drunk and climbing stairs?) On such a large plane, of
course, it is important not to misplace anything. Thus it is a
particular problem when Kyle awakes from a brief nap to discover Julia
is missing.

She begins her search calmly enough, but becomes increasingly
agitated as she can find no sign of her daughter. Other factors
subsequently contribute to her anxiety: Though there are more than 400
people on the plane, none of them ever noticed Julia, and the crew seems
skeptical the girl was ever on board. Julia's belongings are missing, as is
her ticket, which Kyle had put in her own pants pocket. The passenger
manifest doesn't include Julia's name. Kyle responds to these
developments with heightening paranoia and anger--demanding ever-more
intrusive searches of the plane, accosting an Arab passenger--until a
radio call back to Berlin reveals the appalling truth: Julia died days
before, falling from the same rooftop as her father. In her grief, Kyle
had simply lost her mind, hallucinating that Julia was alive and
accompanying her on the plane.

Had the movie ended here, it would have been a drab, ill-spirited
little picture, though one with at least some minimal shred of
authenticity. But this flight is bound for a considerably more
ridiculous destination. (Spoilers follow, though believe me, this is a
story that merits spoiling.) Julia is not dead and Kyle is not insane.
Rather the two of them have been caught up in a conspiracy so fiendishly
complex that it is, in fact, utterly idiotic. In an uncharacteristic
spasm of credulity, Roger Ebert described Flightplan's plot as
"airtight," which it is to approximately the same degree as a whiffle
ball. There are far too many inanities to catalog here, so I'll describe
just one: For the villains' plan to succeed, it was not merely
convenient, but necessary that not a single soul on the plane
ever notice Julia--not when she boarded, not when she and mom moved to
an empty row for a nap, not when she was drugged by the conspirators and
pulled from her seat and stuffed into a food bin and carted away. Had
anyone on the flight ever noticed any of this (or had Kyle not moved
them to an empty row, or not fallen asleep, or--whoops, I promised only
one inanity) the entire plot would have failed. And here you thought it
was impossible to plan more shoddily than the Bush administration did
for post-war Iraq.

But perhaps worse even than Flightplan's historically moronic
conspiracy is its tone. In part because the plot is so asinine, the
movie focuses largely on Kyle's emotional state. She doesn't do so much as feel,
in agonized frame after agonized frame. Her grief over a dead husband
and missing child is the only real hook the movie has to get viewers
involved, so it fetishizes her pain relentlessly. The result is
something akin to emotional pornography.

Jodie Foster's performance is not exactly bad, but it is painfully
one-note. She careens around the plane, her face tight as a drum, in
varying states of rage and panic. It's the kind of Big Performance that
is supposed to make a film, but in this case renders it very nearly
unwatchable. Foster has never worn stardom lightly, and in recent years
that discomfort has become evident onscreen as well as off. This is the
second consecutive starring role (the first was 2002's Panic Room)
in which she has played a terrified single mother trying to protect her
child from villainous predators. Indeed, the theme of predation on
women and children runs through most of her major performances, with her
initially in the role of victim (Taxi Driver, The Accused) and later in that of protector (The Silence of the Lambs). When, in Flightplan, she pleads for help finding her daughter because, "People do things to little girls, sick
things," it seems as though she is speaking from the anguished
pseudo-experience of having played a hooker at the tender age of 13.

Flightplan has more of everything than Red Eye: A
bigger budget, bigger star, bigger emotions, bigger plot twists, and, of
course, a bigger plane. One can almost hear the satisfied voices of the producers when,
upon first seeing the airliner, Julia says, "It's so big," and Kyle
replies proudly, "It's the biggest." It is yet another proof that, in
Hollywood, bigger is usually worse.

The Home Movies List: B+ Entertainments

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). Another
mid-level film demonstrates the considerable virtue of just not screwing
up. Nothing in it is great, but nothing is lousy either, and the result
is surprisingly satisfying. Compare this to an earlier stab at Dumas,
1998's The Man in the Iron Mask, whose fistful of international
stars (with their competing accents) and welter of intersecting
storylines contributed to a sodden, ill-shaped mess.

Cellular (2004). Kim Basinger seems to me a meta-actress:
She knows there's a craft called acting and she's seen it up close
enough times that she can manage a reasonable facsimile. In Cellular,
her typically mannered performance as a kidnapped high-school teacher
is a little off-putting. But it's more than made up for by Chris Evans's
easy surfer charm as the unlikely hero whose cell phone she calls at
random. Further evidence that when it comes to thrillers, simplicity is
usually a virtue.

Sky High (2005). Okay, maybe this is more of a B-, but
it's a likable underachiever. This tossed-off family film about a child
of famous superheroes who hasn't yet come into his powers doesn't have a
tenth the wit or imagination of Pixar's magnificent The Incredibles. But it knows it doesn't, and this recognition gives it a good-natured hokiness that more ambitious films generally lack.

"Law & Order" (hasn't it been with us always?). Where did the
B+ movies go? To the little screen, where the whole point is to find an
infinitely replicable formula and stick with it. Future historians will
be able to argue the relative merit of "CSI"'s flow-chart forensics,
but for now "Law & Order," with 16 seasons and innumerable cast
changes under its belt, is the reigning champ.